Trying to Clean Up Sweeps

This past January, NBC began airing commercials to promote a
guest appearance by Ellen DeGeneres on its popular sitcom Will
& Grace. In a classic bit of stunt casting, the network
hired the comedienne and out-of-the-closet lesbian to portray a
nun, showing her cavorting wildly in the promo while dressed
modestly in a clerical habit. Outrageous? Absolutely. Senseless? On
the contrary, the move made perfect sense. Producers timed her
cameo to air during the heart of February sweeps.

weeps, those special, month-long ratings periods in November,
February, and May, represent the silly seasons of television
programming, when no audience-luring gimmick, watch-and-win
sweepstakes, or blockbuster miniseries is too salacious,
provocative, or bizarre for public consumption. They're the months
when Nielsen Media Research measures the viewership of local
stations in all 210 U.S. television markets, to determine what
rates advertisers must pay for spot and local TV commercials. With
an estimated $24 billion in ad revenue at stake, network executives
and their affiliate stations unleash all manner of programming
mayhem in an effort to increase the size of the coveted 18- to
49-year-old demographic in individual markets. â€œTo television
producers, there's Christmas, there's Yom Kippur, and there's
sweeps,â€? says Jay Kernis, a veteran producer at CBS's 60
Minutes. â€œYou prepare for it like a religious
experience. You either lose or save your soul depending on how
successful you are during sweeps.â€?

But the hoopla surrounding sweeps masks a dark side to audience
measurement. Many researchers view the current method of counting
local viewers as flawed, outdated, and inaccurate. Nielsen, which
has dominated TV ratings at the national and local level for more
than three decades, measures the audience size of network shows via
its so-called people meters, electronic set-top boxes that are
placed in 5,000 homes around the country. To monitor the
demographics of local stations, however, Nielsen goes low-tech,
distributing paper diaries to 2 million volunteers over the course
of a year, with requests that they record the programs watched
during one week of a sweeps month. (Additionally, the company
installs 400 to 500 set-top meters in the top 53 markets to help
determine which households watch what programs, though not which
people watch what shows inside those homes.)

The Demographics of Network Television Desperately seeking
18- to 49-year-olds.

Sweeps isn't just a numbers game.
It's also a demographics game. Advertisers traditionally pay local
stations for commercial time based on their ability to deliver an
audience of 18- to 49-year-olds. But as the oldest Boomers reach
their 50s, TV networks like CBS are encouraging advertisers to
change the medium's favored target to 25- to 54- and even 25- to
64-year-olds. â€œThe Baby Boomers have managed to cross over
the 54-year-old threshold, and there's no evidence that their
spending powers are diminishing,â€? says CBS research chief
David Poltrack.

But sweeps and the diary method remain a demographics problem.
Because local and spot advertisers need the demographic data to
make sure stations are delivering their target audience, the
antiquated diaries remain the measurement tool of choice in all 210
markets. And the extraordinary programming and promotion efforts
during sweeps throws off the validity of audience measurement for
the rest of the year. Networks and their affiliates design their
stunts to pull in extra viewers for local stations during sweeps.
Yet those exaggerated figures are the ones that stations use to
charge advertisers for commercial time year-round â€” long
after the fickle public has reverted to its old habits. One CBS
study found that the overall audience for the four major networks
drops 10 percent to 15 percent between periods of original
programming and the repeats that dominate non-sweeps months.
â€œSweeps programming hurts us and hurts the public,â€?
says David Poltrack, executive vice president for research and
planning at CBS. â€œTelevision viewers dislike having to decide
which of two major movies to watch in February while finding only
repeats on in March.â€?

What's bad for viewers is even worse for advertisers. Media
buyers have no way of knowing how many viewers stick around during
the nine dreary months filled mostly with reruns. And the issue is
about to get more complicated as the arrival of digital technology
creates alternative ways to watch TV, and more accurate methods of
counting viewers. â€œSweeps are a travesty,â€? says Susan
Nathan, senior vice president and director of media knowledge at
Universal McCann, and chair of the media research committee for the
American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA).
â€œAdvertisers buy time on stations 365 days a year, yet we
have no idea what ratings are for most of the year when there
aren't those hyped, big-event programs.â€? Nathan speaks for
many in the advertising community when she concludes, â€œSweeps
should be done away with.â€?

Dispatching sweeps to the dustbin of TV history is hardly a new
idea. Advertisers initiated broadcast ratings in 1930 in order to
count radio listeners for the shows they produced and sponsored.
The term sweeps dates back to the 1950s, when Nielsen began mailing
diaries to households and reporting the results, first with East
Coast markets before sweeping across the country. As TV networks
gradually took control of programming, they needed better
demographic numbers to calculate how much they could charge for
commercials on specific shows. Local stations couldn't afford to
track overnight ratings year-round, as the networks do, so they
settled on the four monthlong sweeps (another occurs in July, but
is less important due to relatively few summer viewers).

Gradually, Nielsen built a monopoly on the TV ratings business,
knocking out its last major competitor, Arbitron, in 1993. More
recently, various companies and consortia have tried to dethrone
Nielsen's reign over the TV ratings business, but to no avail. In
1999, Statistical Research Inc. ended the latest major threat
â€” the $40 million SMART TV initiative â€” after the
broadcast networks dropped financial backing for the project. The
initiative would have produced a digital TV coding system and the
ability to give clients respondent-level data, features that
Nielsen claimed would soon be incorporated into its systems.
Indeed, the biggest complaint was that SMART was a
â€œme-tooâ€? service that failed to deliver greater
benefits than those offered by Nielsen.

But such failures haven't muted the cry for sweeps reform. Trade
groups such as the AAAA have proposed increasing the number of
weeks Nielsen measures, thereby reducing the likelihood that local
stations will rely on programming stunts to artificially boost
ratings. But Karen Kratz, Nielsen's director of communications,
insists that the idea is too costly for small-market stations.
â€œIn a perfect world, putting people meters in all the markets
is what we'd want to do,â€? she says. â€œBut there's not
enough advertising dollars in smaller markets to make it worth
their while.â€?

And there's little incentive for local broadcast stations to
push for changing the archaic system. At most stations, year-round
monitoring will only result in lower ratings and ad revenues, says
Universal McCann's Susan Nathan. Still, she regards that resistance
as a short-sighted view for a long-term problem. â€œIt's a
Catch-22 situation,â€? she observes. â€œNielsen should have
been leading the charge to a better system but hasn't in the past.
And the stations have been too afraid of year-round numbers hurting
their bottom line. The blame goes all around.â€?

Must-See TV Lifestyles of

Survivor

and

Friends

viewers

PRODUCTS/LEISURE/PSYCHOGRAPHICS

U.S. AVG.

SURVIVOR

FRIENDS

Bought jeans in last year

66.8%

71.1%

76.8%

Drink liquor

45.4%

50.0%

56.0%

Foreign travel in last three years

41.0%

41.0%

42.4%

Agree: â€œI enjoy taking risksâ€?

38.4%

41.5%

45.2%

Agree: â€œOn the whole, people get what they
deserveâ€?

38.3%

30.0%

34.2%

Drink diet cola

34.0%

36.0%

37.3%

Own foreign car

32.9%

33.7%

38.9%

Camping in last year

18.7%

22.5%

23.8%

Bought women's swimsuit in last year

13.1%

15.2%

22.5%

Drink espresso/cappuccino

11.6&

13.4%

13.2%

Source: Simmons Market Research
Bureau-Fall 2000

Measurement Alternatives

Few in the industry deny that some kind of overhaul is needed.
Even Nielsen executives say that their technology misses viewing
that occurs outside the home â€” in bars and offices. The
impending arrival of convergence technology means that Americans
will soon routinely watch TV shows on their computers, Palm Pilots,
and wireless devices. â€œYou've got to be able to measure
someone watching a TV show on their Palm Pilot on the train going
to work,â€? says Howard Shimmel, president of Symmetrical
Resources, a marketing research firm based in Deerfield Beach,
Florida, and parent company of Simmons Market Research Bureau.
â€œIf we don't solve these issues sooner than later, it's going
to get ugly.â€?

Toward that end, researchers are scrambling to develop new and
improved ways of measuring TV audiences. Symmetrical recently
launched TV Programming Clusters, a system that segments viewers
based on Nielsen data and Simmons surveys. Media buyers can choose
from among 23 distinct clusters: One segment, for instance,
consists primarily of fans of cop/lawyer dramas, while another is
filled with devotees of the Judge Judy- and
Maury-type courtroom and talk shows. Advertisers then hone
their media mix based on shows favored by their target market,
using the TV clusters to supplement rather than to supplant Nielsen
ratings. â€œThe clusters allow advertising agencies to define
the viewers that really matter to them,â€? explains Shimmel.
â€œIt shows subtleties where they may have been paying for
high-priced inventory they didn't need or ignored some undervalued
inventory that would work well for the viewers they
want.â€?

To improve the measurement of smaller cable TV audiences,
traditionally undercounted by Nielsen, a Florida-based company
called ADcom has developed a set-top meter system named VVR, or
viewership valuation record. After connecting viewership meters to
every TV set in the homes of panelists, the company takes channel
readings every five seconds to passively record which programs are
being watched. ADcom then uses follow-up phone interviews to
determine who was in a room at a particular time, allowing a
company to produce year-round cable ratings by day part, target
audience, and network ranking. Although the 5-year-old company has
launched set-meter panels in only three markets so far â€”
Jacksonville, Dallas, and San Francisco â€” it has recently
begun an aggressive expansion. Backed by ad-agency Goliath, WPP, it
hopes to offer cable measurement in the nation's 20 largest markets
within two years.

An even bigger challenge to Nielsen recently arrived as a joint
venture of shopping network QVC and its majority owner, Comcast,
the cable system operator. Called TargetTV, the service relies on
digital set-top boxes to monitor viewer behavior, recording
â€œclickstreamâ€? data every five seconds in order to
capture channel surfing. The service, launched last year, now
operates in 60,000 homes in Philadelphia, with the goal of
expanding to 750,000 homes nationwide. Though there are drawbacks
â€” TargetTV fails to capture non-cable users and those with
analog cable boxes â€” it found a receptive audience at this
spring's Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) convention, and the
deep pockets of its backers certainly improve its prospects for
survival.

Another alternative to paper diaries involves a computer model
that helps predict viewing habits based on the set-top meters
Nielsen uses in the 50 largest markets. Funded by a $60,000 ARF
grant, media consultant Erwin Ephron is now testing a methodology
that gleans the demographic characteristics of viewers using
household tuning data. As he explains, â€œYou know that if the
set in the kitchen is tuned to Oprah, it's probably a
woman who's watching. If it's football in the den, it's probably a
man. If the Cartoon Channel is on, it's probably a kid.â€?
Ephron believes that such viewer modeling may be superior to both
people meters and diaries in smaller markets because of the
â€œnoiseâ€? generated by low response rates and poor record
keeping. But the project is still in the early stages and a year
away from a national launch.

Perhaps the most promising new technology in TV ratings is
Arbitron's â€œportable people meterâ€? (PPM), which
measures the person, not the appliance or the household. The
pager-size device detects an inaudible code embedded in the audio
signal of a TV or cable program, radio show, or Internet streaming
video. At the end of the day, a person carrying around the device
simply drops it into a bay station, which then sends the ratings
information to Arbitron. Linda Dupree, senior vice president in
advertiser agency services for Arbitron, maintains that the PPM is
superior to the traditional set-top meter because it captures
audience behavior year-round, it tracks media consumption outside
the home, and it tracks all different kinds of media. â€œIt
blunts the whole sweeps promotion issue,â€? she says.
â€œAnd it allows advertisers to make apples-to-apples
comparisons across all media.â€?

But the device may not be ready for prime time for some time.
After being tested for three years in Britain, Arbitron began PPM
trials in Wilmington, Delaware, this spring, with plans to form a
panel in the entire Philadelphia market in 2002. The goal is then
to expand â€œaggressivelyâ€? into the nation's top 10
markets, says Dupree, but there's no announced timetable for
rolling out the service. The company has also skirted potential
opposition from Nielsen by giving its one-time rival the option to
develop PPM technology should it go into commercial production.

That type of co-opting partnership has become typical for
Nielsen. In preparation for the media landscape of the future, the
company has already formed an alliance with Intel for a
â€œsoftware meterâ€? that can measure TV viewing on Windows
98. Other deals are tied to the development of interactive
television and ITV viewership measurement. Earlier this year,
Nielsen launched a demonstration project placing people meters in
the Boston market, capturing year-round viewer demographics as well
as household TV usage at the local station level. Eventually, the
company would like to see the people meters in the nation's 10
largest metro markets.

But there's still no long-term plan to bring people meters to
all 210 markets. And even with a successful test, any replacement
for the Nielsen sweeps system would have to overcome stiff
resistance. Local stations would likely be reluctant to adopt any
system resulting in lower audience numbers and increased costs for
year-round ratings. And ad agencies wouldn't be pleased if a new
measurement system indicated that prior programming selections and
fees were inappropriate. â€œThere's a lot of money at
stake,â€? says Symmetrical's Shimmel, who estimates that a
completely new TV ratings service may require a couple of years and
$100 million in start-up costs. â€œSwitching from one
measurement service to another is a monumental change.â€?

How Soon the Future?

Another wild card in the potential conversion to a new
measurement system is the pace at which Americans may adopt
â€œsmarterâ€? TV technology that allows personal recording
and interactive video programming. The new generation of digital
set-top boxes not only delivers cable and satellite programming but
also has the capacity to track whatever shows a turned-on set is
receiving. The downside is that personal video recording systems
like TiVo are always turned on (and able to record programs
throughout the week), but researchers currently don't know which
shows are being recorded because TiVo strips all the personal data
over who's watching what shows to avoid raising privacy
concerns.

Hoping to answer these questions, ASI Entertainment, Nielsen,
and TiVo recently created the National In-House TV Lab to explore
how viewers use digital video recorders. Do they record one or five
shows a day? Do they fast-forward through some or all of the
commercials? Some of the answers will be known this year as ASI
completes the formation of several regional panels to test TiVo
usage. But the possibility of most viewers whizzing through
commercials may have long-range implications. Dave Charmatz, ASI's
executive vice president, believes that advertisers may soon create
messages that will appear on your screen even as you fast-forward
through a commercial. â€œIt couldn't be subliminal because
that's illegal,â€? he says. â€œBut advertising is like
Jurassic Park. Just as life finds a way to exist,
advertising finds a way to get across its message.â€?

Jim Spaeth, president of the ARF, counters that TV advertising
may eventually go retro, returning to the early days of the medium
when advertisers relied on corporate sponsorships and ad placements
to get their message across. Still others say that TV advertising
will evolve into more futuristic forms, boosted by interactive
technology that allows viewers to click on their screens and move
from TV image to a related Web site through a process called
Channel HyperLinking. According to the creator of the technology,
Philadelphia-based WorldGate Communications, it allows viewers to
click on, say, TV ads for General Motors and Kraft and then jump to
company Web sites. At the same time, Wink Communications, based in
Alameda, California, allows nearly 2.5 million cable viewers to
reply to TV offers, buy products, and participate in games, using
their remote controls during an enhanced program or commercial. A
report last year stated that of the 2 percent who click on the
enhancements, a whopping 42 percent follow through on the offers
presented whether they accepted free brochures or purchased
products. â€œDirect mail can't touch a response rate like
that,â€? says Josh Bernoff, a principal analyst with Forrester
Research, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. â€œSoon, smarter
TV will coexist with plain old TV.â€?

The success of such convergence technology may call into
question traditional ways advertisers count demographically
preferred viewers, which, after all, is what sweeps is all about.
Given the many new platforms for delivering TV programs and
commercials, advertisers may soon have to assign different values
to viewers in different settings. The travelers who catch a few
minutes of a show on a TV in an airport lounge may be worth less
than the viewers of interactive systems like WebTV or RespondTV who
click on their screens to respond to ads. Bernoff maintains that TV
executives will soon follow the online pricing model of charging
variable rates pegged to the viewer's response: One fee based on
passive viewing, a higher one for those who click through, and the
highest one charged for those moved to buy.

â€œAn ad that stimulates a lot of response will be worth
more than one that just sits there,â€? Bernoff says.
â€œInteractive TV allows you to monetize a viewer's attention.
You'll soon see a shift toward the value of TV based on viewer
interaction, not just advertising impressions.â€?

But such lofty predictions have been heard before, and the
timetable for such change is still in doubt. Last year, less than 1
percent of U.S. households had interactive TV. Forrester predicts
explosive growth, stating that over 60 million households will be
able to interact with their TV programming by 2005. But will
viewers actually use TV in an interactive way? â€œThat's the 64
million dollar question,â€? says ARF's Spaeth, â€œwhether
the couch potato will turn into a different vegetable. Will people
actually use TV's interactive capability, or will it just become
some more buttons on their remote control that they won't touch? No
one knows.â€?

Given such uncertainty, trying to predict when sweeps may one
day end is admittedly a fool's game. Several experts insisted that
the archaic system will finally die in the next decade. Others
weren't so sure. â€œI believe that sweeps will one day be gone,
but probably when I'm retired on a beach in Hawaii,â€? says CBS
research chief David Poltrack, 55. â€œAnd that's the optimistic
forecast. The pessimistic forecast is that I will not be of this
world.â€?

Of course, viewers may one day simply get tired of the same old
manipulative tactics during sweeps and, like the characters in the
movie Network, open their windows and scream that they
won't take it any more. Market researchers would have fun trying to
calculate the odds of that occurring. It's probably as likely as a
lesbian comic undergoing a personality-change operation and turning
into a nun.

Contributing Editor Michael J. Weiss is a journalist and
marketing consultant. He recently completed a Knight-Bagehot
Fellowship in Economics and Business Journalism at Columbia
University.